Hephaestus's flustered scolding only made Tsubaki grin wider. She laced her hands lazily behind her head and swaggered right up to Haimer.
"All right, all right. We all know our Lady Hephaestus has thin skin."
Tsubaki bumped Haimer's arm with her shoulder, her voice all teasing.
"Lord Haimer, take a look at her. If anyone back in the workshop dared to hold up a job like that, Lady Hephaestus's hammer would have been airborne long ago."
"You're the only one alive who can get her red in the face and still have her going out of her way to make things easy for you." "Come on, let's move. Stay any longer and that hammer's going to come flying at us."
At those words, Hephaestus clenched the parchment schematic in her hand and walked off toward the pile of granite blocks without a single word.
Haimer knew his old friend's temper well enough. Rather than needle her further, he simply nodded along with Tsubaki.
"Then I'll trouble you to lead the way, Miss Tsubaki."
He turned with a smile and called over the two girls still standing there in a daze.
"Tsukuyo, Lili. Come along."
"Yes, Kami-sama."
Tsukuyo Inaba hugged White Egret to her chest, and her tabi-clad steps came a little lighter.
Lili trotted up to fall in at his side.
Leaving the dust of the new base behind them, the group set out along Northwest Avenue in the direction of the Red Chamber.
The morning street carried a chill. On both sides of the flagstone road, shops were taking down their door panels one after another, stripping away the cloth curtains that kept out the wind.
Hawkers' cries and the grind of cartwheels wove together, all of it the street-level vitality that belonged to the Labyrinth City alone.
Tsubaki walked at the front, hands still pillowed behind her head.
"Speaking of which, Lord Haimer, what kind of material are you planning to sink into the little one's weapon this time?"
She tilted her head, her single eye flicking to Lili at Haimer's heels, and spoke without the slightest tact.
"That old wooden crossbow on her back really is too shabby for words."
"It'll do for knocking over a few monsters on the upper floors, but carry it down to the lower levels or the deep floors and it won't hold up at all. One pull on the string and it'll come apart."
When the subject was forging, Tsubaki's judgment never missed.
Sitting in the captain's seat of the [Hephaestus Familia], she had seen rare treasures beyond counting, and her eye had long since been tempered into a pair of red-hot quenching tongs, able to weigh the worth of any piece of gear at a glance.
Walking behind them, Lili heard that appraisal.
She slipped both hands behind her back and shoved the little hand crossbow she had always treated as her lifeline further around her waist, hiding it under her red cloak.
A thin flush rose over her small, delicately pretty face.
Together with the smudge of soot on the tip of her little nose, that cramped, self-conscious posture made her look smaller and more pitiful than ever.
After all, the gear she had scraped and bled for over most of her life amounted, in an expert's eyes, to nothing better than a rotten plank.
Haimer listened, and his calm, thoughtful gaze swept over the hand Lili had tucked behind her back.
That little crossbow. It really did have to go. And not only because it could never keep pace with the intensity of the fights ahead.
Making this pass through the mundane world of the Lower World stirred something in him.
Memories from his previous life, the ones that mapped every hidden current of this Labyrinth City's fate, woke and stretched long in his mind.
If destiny had been allowed to run along its ordinary, undisturbed track.
Lili would have replaced that half-rotten crossbow sooner or later anyway.
After all, she was fated to receive 『Squirrel Walnut』.
When it came to divine arms, in a place as cramped and expensive as present-day Orario, two great factions stood above all others in forging.
The first, naturally, was the [Hephaestus Familia], whose captain was currently strolling ahead of them without a care in the world.
A thousand smiths sharing the furnaces, and in Valka's Red House the roaring fires never went out from dusk to dawn.
They pursued superb quality and sheer volume at the same time, and with a production line refined to its absolute limit they carried the hard demand of nearly seventy percent of Orario's entire dungeon-crawling army.
They were the undisputed backbone of the city's war industry.
The other was the [Goibniu Familia], tucked away in the bustle of the city, devoted to slow work and fine results.
Their elite smiths almost never touched bulk production orders.
What they took on were long-term commissions, custom-fitted for top-tier adventurers with deep pockets.
They forged without haste. Bring them the rare raw materials from the deep, forbidden reaches, throw enough Valis at them, and even if it took years, that crowd would grind out a one-of-a-kind blade of breathtaking quality, inch by inch.
The [Sword of Despair] in Ais's hand, the one whose name sent monsters fleeing, had come from those forges.
It could be said that every [First-Class Armament] carried by the full roster of the Loki Familia's first corps was likewise a masterwork that the [Goibniu Familia] had poured its heart and blood into.
Lili's "Small Hand Crossbow: Robin" and her "Crossbow: Squirrel Walnut" had both come from Goibniu hands.
Nor was that all.
The Loki Familia's meticulous Pallum leader, [Braver] Finn Deimne, in order to quietly look after a lonely fellow Pallum.
Had gone so far as to smuggle out the offcuts left over after his own exclusive spear had been ground and quenched, scrap of extraordinary hardness.
He passed every piece of it to Lili, to be blended in as the main material of the new crossbow's frame.
That windfall did more than stretch "Squirrel Walnut's" range considerably.
The force it could hold once the string was fully wound, and the killing power behind it, took a leap in kind.
Load the internal bolt magazine properly, trip the mechanism.
And at short to medium range the penetrating destruction it produced climbed to the terrifying neighborhood of what only a [First-Class Armament] could deliver.
Pair that with Lili's already exceptional cool-headedness.
With explosive, poisoned, and smoke bolts and every other specialty round she scavenged from the outer markets, she could work that crossbow alone and, in the middle of a shifting, tangled monster siege, tune the exact return every squeeze of the trigger bought for her side.
That was the greatest asset Lili built her life on in the years that followed.
Except…
Time had run backward. The world had turned over. And now.
Haimer tilted his head to look at Lili, still walking beside him with her eyes on the ground.
A gentle smile spread across his face, the kind that put people at ease without their knowing why.
Lili had already climbed out of that swamp. From here on she would be raised as the strategic core, formally gathered under the wing of his [Haimer Familia].
No need to lean on Finn's charity of scrap metal. No need to wait, either.
A [First-Class Armament]? Under his authority as the very root of "Smithing," the thing wasn't even hard enough to shim a table leg.
Give him enough material to build on, and with nothing but his own hammer rising and falling he could produce work that would drop the jaws of every mortal in the Lower World.
As for the internal frame of this new weapon, Haimer had sketched the blueprint out in his head long ago.
It had to fit a Pallum's naturally slight, delicate wrists and build.
More than that, it had to dig deep into Lili's own magic and mesh with it, the transformation art 『Cinderella』.
Mobility, shifting forms, counterplay in the most extreme survival conditions. Those would be Lili's greatest trump cards in the years she would spend walking the edge of the knife.
And building her, from the very start, a repeating mechanical crossbow of an entirely new structure, one capable of shooting down oversized monsters, was only the beginning.
Haimer's plans reached far further than that.
"Since she's the core of the back line, the armor has to be rebuilt as well."
He ran the numbers silently.
In this mundane corner of the Lower World, physical equipment and Grace-born skills devoted purely to concealment and escape were pitifully rare.
But if he took the trouble to layer several rows of miniature energy-gathering arrays into the interlining of her new boot soles, engraved in shrunken script of the Heavens.
Powered by Magic Stone powder.
Then the instant the wearer tripped the mechanism, the wind would take her weight and hold it as light as a goose feather.
And once the user poured her own mental energy down into it, that array beneath her toes could freeze even the thinnest air currents inside the Dungeon solid in a heartbeat, turning them into bedrock, a temporary foothold as steady as level ground.
Which meant lateral leaps through open air, in defiance of every rule of movement.
With the wind behind her, whether braking backward or accelerating out of an encirclement, she would be lifted to a place where nothing could ever run her down.
A hard-edged combination like that, ranged fire and evasion together.
Even if the girl had the bad luck to run headlong into one of those high-risk upper-floor monsters famed for explosive speed, or fell by accident into the wide killing net of a deep-floor hunt.
Lili would only have to tap her feet calmly to wake the array's patterns, then run off across empty air on the wind. No one would hold her.
While that blueprint was taking shape in Haimer's mind.
The group's steps had already carried them out through several broad, thriving market streets.
At last, an unmissable outer wall rose directly before them: an enormous structure of heat-resistant crimson stone bricks, each block fitted against the next without a hair's gap, sprawling across an immense footprint.
This was [Valka's Red House].
The largest facility in all of Orario, the heart and home base where the [Hephaestus Familia] hammered day and night and put its highest-grade goods on display for sale.
"Come on. It runs hot inside, so mind you don't get knocked off your feet by the heat."
Tsubaki tossed the warning over her shoulder and kicked the heavy iron courtyard gate open.
The moment they stepped into the main hall, it was like standing inside a volcano about to erupt.
Suffocating heat, laced with the sharp burnt reek that only comes from metal filings catching fire, came pouring down in an avalanche through the skylight frames set around the raised atrium.
Inside the forging hub, broad as a small plaza.
Countless heavy leather bellows, three and four men tall, were being hauled at with everything a crowd of thick-armed apprentices had.
As the air rushed in.
Flame roared to the ceiling along the unbroken row of glowing crimson furnaces.
In front of each giant furnace stood several bare-chested smiths.
They swung their sledges through perfect textbook arcs.
And brought them down, blow after blow, on half-solidified billets of high-purity mana steel.
Every strike knocked thousands upon thousands of sparks across the flat face of the anvil, dazzling as fireworks.
Along both sides of the safe passage leading toward the inner rooms.
Behind display walls of specially reinforced shock-resistant glass, even the lowest grade of stock was laid out in neat order, finished weapons worth thousands upon thousands of Valis apiece.
Blades, spears, swords and halberds, cold light sliding along their edges. It was enough to blind a man.
With Tsubaki and Haimer themselves leading the way, no one stopped them.
The group cut left and right through the maze of furnace bays.
And finally halted before a solid metal isolation door a full thirty centimeters thick.
It was the same old route Haimer had walked here before.
Behind that heavy door lay the private forge of the goddess Hephaestus.
Tsubaki gripped the wheel-shaped bolt one-handed, put her hips into it, and turned the intricate cluster of gears.
A muffled clack, and the moment the great door parted even a crack.
The pressure inside, dozens of times more still and pure than the din outside, seeped straight out at them.
"Right, Lord Haimer. Let's get in there and start work."
"As for you two little ladies."
Tsubaki turned, fixing her eye on Lili and Tsukuyo, who both looked rather lost out there.
"You'll just have to be patient and wait on the bench outside for a while."
"It's far too hot in there, and sparks don't care whose skin they land on. Besides…"
Tsubaki dropped her voice on purpose, dragging the last syllable out long, her gaze lingering on Haimer for a good two seconds.
"The next part of the process… well now, I'll be shut up in that airtight iron cage with Lord Haimer, door barred, doing the sort of thing only grown adults get up to together~"
"No minors allowed to watch, mm?"
The words landed.
And Haimer, who was composed as a rule, felt his face twitch.
It was one thing for Tsubaki to trade crude jokes in private with the women she was close to.
But saying something that suggestive in front of the two girls under his roof, whose minds were only half grown, was another matter entirely.
And sure enough.
As that teasing final note faded.
Tsukuyo and Lili, already pressed shoulder to shoulder by the oppressive heat of the place, went rigid at the same instant, taut as a drawn bowstring.
Tsukuyo Inaba's hand clamped around the hilt of her weapon, and her pale, slender neck flushed like a chimney flue that had just caught fire.
Her eyes were blind. She could not see a thing of what lay inside that room.
But with her extraordinary hearing, in the instant the door had swung open.
She had heard it clearly.
Apart from one enormous anvil and a set of bellows, there was no third person in that chamber at all!
One grown woman, hard-edged strength radiating off every inch of her.
One tall Kami-sama.
One soundproof iron door about to seal shut. Very high temperatures. Clothing… would probably come off rather casually, in heat like that.
The sort of thing only adults do together…
In Tsukuyo's head the wild, sultry images from that night assembled themselves all over again, and two jets of steam looked ready to come whistling out of the top of her skull!
She hurried to shut eyes that could not see anything anyway, turned her back, and muttered a jumble of things under her breath, "hear no evil" among them.
And Lili, beside her.
Took the line square in the face and went dizzy, her eyes spiraling like mosquito coils.
Lord Haimer and Lady Tsubaki… does f-forging really have to be done this privately?
"Lili! Lili would never peek through the crack in the door!"
Lili clutched her head in fright and crouched down beside the soft leather couch set out for guests on the far side of the corridor.
Haimer looked at the woman who was never happier than when stirring up trouble, and had now dumped a bucket of it over his head.
"That's enough out of you."
He caught her by the back of her collar, thoroughly out of patience.
"If you've got that much time to flap your lips, go over to that corner in a moment and set out the refined black steel and the spirit-melting oil for me in proper order."
And with that.
There came a slam.
Before Tsubaki could get another laughing jab in.
The thick, solid isolation door of the sealed chamber swung on its hinge mechanism and locked itself shut for good.
Inside the sealed forge. The heat pressed close.
Tsubaki put away that flippant grin of hers and gathered her loose black hair back with a cord, tying it tight behind her head.
Then she walked over to the tool rack.
"All right. Jokes are jokes."
"But since Lord Haimer is taking the hammer himself again, there's no point in me making a fool of myself over the usual business of lighting the fires and firing the furnace."
Tsubaki folded her arms and turned to face him, and the curiosity of a master smith confronting an unknown craft surfaced in her eye again.
"So you're working the metal yourself this time. How do you want me to lend a hand? Should I pick out which raw ores blend up with the best resistance under pressure?"
"Anything Lady Hephaestus keeps in her private vault, all those dozens of precious materials on the never-disclosed list, the ones she saves for the bottom of the chest. Just name it and it's yours."
Haimer undid the shirt buttons that got in the way of his movements and smoothed his cuffs flat.
"Go bring me those pieces of lightweight gray quartz, the ones used to absorb loose drifting magic. Then find me some [Kakarot Sea Vine Sinew] for the base material of the winch string."
"Not one of the heavy metals. Leave them all where they are."
"As for the quenching…"
And Haimer rattled off a shopping list of materials that left Tsubaki staring at him, speechless.
And after that.
Out in the scorching corridor beyond the sealed chamber.
"Clang. Bang." Faint metallic tremors leaked now and then through the seams of the heavy soundproof door.
Each one like the beat of a muffled thunder-drum, stripped of several layers of its strength.
In the corridor.
Tsukuyo Inaba knelt in perfect form at one end of the soft leather bench.
Her hands would not stay still, rubbing at the fabric over her knees.
She kept warning herself with the Heart-Calming Mantra not to let her skill slip loose.
But an innocent girl's heart was never going to survive a wait this quiet and this long.
"Lili…" Tsukuyo called softly toward the far end of the couch a little way off.
"Wh-what do you think they're doing in there right now?"
Lili had been hugging her knees, curled into a ball, staring at nothing.
Hearing the question.
A knot of conflict all but rose visibly off the top of her head.
"P-probably… t-taking off their outer clothes?"
Lili had a quick mind, and years spent beside street stalls had shown her a great many things.
"I've seen those big blacksmiths hammering away bare-chested on the street corners… the sparks fly so high. A long shirt would just get in Lord Haimer's way."
"And there's nobody in there except Lady Tsubaki and Lord Haimer."
"So if Lord Haimer loosens his clothes… Lady Tsubaki has definitely seen it all."
Lili clapped both hands over her scalding cheeks, her voice escaping through her fingers.
"Uuuuu… Lili should have followed them in. Lili really envies Lady Tsubaki's nerve."
Tsukuyo bit down on a lower lip gone white. The moment she heard "loosens his clothes."
The scalding information she had been forced to take in the night before came surging back, and her sharp little ears went red enough to bleed.
She shook her head hard, strangled the stray thoughts before they could finish forming, sat up straight and obedient, and even slowed the rhythm of her breathing.
Time slipped away in the muffled clang of hammers, two hours, then three, before anyone noticed.
As noon drew near, the sun climbed high and baked the damp off the flagstones of the main road until they were half dry.
And in exactly those two or three drifting hours.
Something was coming to a boil at the Adventurers Guild headquarters.
Midday. The Adventurers Guild.
This was normally the idle hour when parties finished settling their morning hauls and turning in spoils, then took a little time to rest and talk on the first-floor commons.
A good several hundred people filled the open space.
And in that reception area of several thousand square meters in particular, the scene had frozen into something unnerving, as though a mass time-stop spell had swept through it.
Nearly every person there.
Stood stiff from the waist up.
Eyes locked, without blinking, on the ring of oversized Guild notice and bounty crystal boards mounted at the most prominent spot in the center of the hall!
That crystal board only carried official documents for events of real weight, the successful subjugation of 『Udaeus』, overlord of the thirty-seventh floor, say, or the birth of a new Lv.6 top-class adventurer.
And at this moment. It was plastered layer upon layer.
In enormous heavy black type, the notice read:
[Verified summary of today's latest rank update records. Sealed by: Guild administration.]
[Affiliation: Haimer Familia].
『Koharu Narukami』 - by confirmed excelia accumulation (continuous large-scale extermination of high-tier riot species over multiple days), strength standard met, entering rank Lv.3 effective today! Rating: Absolute Breakthrough.
『Tendou Kisara』 - excelia audit satisfied… entering rank Lv.3!
『Aihara Enju』 - entering rank Lv.3!
『Kohina Hiruko』 - entering rank Lv.3!
『Mary Kikakujou』 - entering rank Lv.3!
Below that ran a dense column of names, every one of them as unfamiliar as if their owners had just crawled out from under some rock somewhere.
All of them, without a single exception.
And especially when the eye followed the list up to the topmost heading of all.
[Haimer Familia: Highest Approved Roster]
Member designation: [Holy Emperor].
Status assessment: during the great riot, deployed an unknown wide-area healing magic that blanketed half the city's districts and successfully saved close to ten thousand lives… comprehensive certification: 『Supreme Extraordinary Excelia』 fulfilled.
Result of update: from Lv.2… consecutive breaches beyond the limit, sublimating upward to Lv.4!
In the next half-tick of the clock, the whole Adventurers Guild headquarters detonated into a roar like a tsunami, loud enough to blow the dome clean off the building.
"T-two ranks at once?! That woman they call the Holy Emperor went up two ranks?! Straight to Lv.4?!"
A dwarf warrior with an enormous double-bladed axe on his back had eyes bulging so far they looked about to fall out, and he clawed at his own beard like a madman.
"Orario's whole damn history, and in less than half a month this place digs up an adventurer who can sublimate two ranks in a row for me?! Consecutive Sublimation is flat-out impossible, all right?!"
"A lie, is it? Use that pig brain of yours and think back to the "Emerald Sun" that rose over the top of Babel Tower a few nights ago!"
"That's right! If Lady Holy Emperor hadn't cast her magic and opened an "Emerald Sun" that covered the whole of Orario… and now you dare slander Lady Holy Emperor, whose "Emerald Sun magic" saved every one of us!"
"Rip that big beard off his face!"
"Yeah! Pull his beard! Pull that big beard of his!"
The whole Guild dissolved into one enormous brawl.
____
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